A Running Consciousness

Run, run, run. For a running creature, it is rare to have the time to think. Run run run. But after a corner, in a cave, silence and refuge. Your temples are pounding and the few instants of clarity can't be wasted, you need to concentrate, no time for funny games. You need to focus on the thing. Damn if only they give me time! Time. Concentrate. Damn! It's easier to spit your heart running, than to squeeze the thing out of brain. Concentrate! Evoke the god of running, ask him. On the altar of my blood and breath: Am I fleeing or chasing?

Rarely, after you find the answer, you keep on resting. Like a darted arrow, like a hungry wolf, like a drop of rain, when you know you're chasing or fleeing, you go. But in the cave, if you wait a second, just meters away, there is a fire. Sit for a while. Ask again your god of running. Ask him why you can ask. Do you need a mind for fleeing or chasing? What do I get after I catch or escape? Nothing. There is just more running. So why do I need a mind in between my running?

What is your mind for? To be self-conscious. To discover the universe. To love a woman (a man, or both). To meet god and say “hi”. To enjoy the pleasure of being incarnated in a body. No.

All these motives are worthy of praise and laudable. But they are at the very most, side-effect. Mind is the shadow of cognition, a fire in front of which, the animal intelligence is dancing, during a glimpse of relief. The dance is the deployment of cognition in front of herself, the measure of changes in the movement.

So, if you are still asking your god of running, reflect (but don't stop dancing). In her divine intelligence, her existence is not menaced by anything, is immortal, is living unchanged by the perturbation of the world. In a word, she doesn't care. She cannot care, because changes affect you, not her.

And if you are affected by changes, you need to spot them. Living beings are constantly on the verge of dissolution. If they don't care, they'll fade away. But a god doesn't care. And she doesn't know a thing about caring. Immortal gods don't know death, so they don't know anything. There is no such a thing as divine knowledge. Even if they had an archive with all the facts of the past and the future, they wouldn't know a thing. Because they don't care. You can't learn if you don't care. And no gain if there is no pain. So now, stop asking your god of running. It doesn't care. But if you don't care, you fade away. Let your gods go, for once let them run away.

Now it's just about us. For us, entities deemed to die, the measure of changes in the movement, is everything, is our nature. We need to navigate in the transformation of the world and guiding the ship, we manifest a mind. What is a mind for? It's the deployment of animal cognition in front of the fire set on by the very activity of deploying it. The shades are dancing like children running on the grass. Children gods, ask those! They running with a touch, the chase turns in a flight. And they spot more and less than it is necessary. Cause, the white can be round and the red is funny. They don't care if you chase or flee, only that you run with them. Those gods, you can trust, they don't tell and command, but play and laugh. Their knowledge is that the white is round and the blue is ugly. That now you go there, then you run, then you stop. That's it. This knowledge, try to respect. Because this is in essence, the best you can get from immortal intelligence.

When you start to see with your mind, that chasing and fleeing is only a game of running with children, then you become a god of running. And then I let you go.

Mind is a fake and the meaningfulness dragon

We live in the assumption that our consciousness is true. Actually we can believe something because our self awareness is the ground of what it means to have a meaning. Our mind stands before the possibility of being true or false: it is the horizon of meaning. And it is fake.

We start to establish meanings, by a scaffolding of stories and narrations. We are taught the game of believing in what we are told. We don't even pay attention at the beginning of the game: in fact it would not be possible. Before the game and long afterwards, we are simply apable of believing or not. Wittgenstein once said that we swallow concepts. It's before having an intellect. Indeed you are building an intellect.

When the game is advanced enough, you acquire the understanding. You mastered the conceptual navigation, you are able to travel from one narrative place to the other. It is something that requires various features. A body, for example. Up to now, we never encountered a disembodied intelligence. So I suppose it has some relevance in our game. The other thing is that we play the game from within. We learn to play in a determined setting, namely a human society, with human players.

The board of the game is made of concepts, which are the product of fantasy. A king, a godfather, a hero, true love, honor, compassion, a president, the most beautiful girl in the world, all these, don't really exist: they can not. They are per definition fictional. They are inventions for our games. Now, our minds can ride only when the beast is provided. We ride narrativity, this is our meaningfulness dragon.

We start our career in forgery with ourselves: it's always the firs step, the bearer of responsibility. Our names are misappropriation of identities. You think it is authentic to bear a name, because it is legitimate to identify a unique consciousness. Have you ever thought that your unique consciousness takes much of his authenticity by having a name? You start to misquote ourself with a name and the rest comes with it. In fact it is more than logic to attribute all the actions which happen to you as the sound and robust line of episodes which belong to your life: your narrativity.

What is a fact in life? I felt warm and happy, a small sun was rising inside my chest and it was dragging me, and so on you call this falling in love. Wonderful. But how is that? Well, your body is designed to like the company of a fellow human being and the idea of that company as well. You heard by other people using that word and you decide that this particular experience falls under the category of love. You don't realize you invented love. It's because we invent things, we give them names and afterward we attach backwards a long tradition. We give nobility to our feeling by attaching ancestors. I fall in love and this is what many other human beings called fallen in love. I'm quoting the past experience of human beings. It is like calling for the authenticity of your feeling by bringing a venerable and respected document. I'm entitled to call this love, because it belongs to the ancient series of the class with the same feeling. But your sentiment is no more than 5 days old.

And the sentiment is the feeling of someone. Now, you must be a mind to be someone. And falling in love, is one step to prove that you are a mind. We collect a bunch of this evidences and after a while there are enough to prove beyond any reasonable doubt, that you are a mind. Try to go in your archive and take a honest look about the “proofs” of your unique consciousness. I'm not suggesting that you are not there. Insane! I'm only suspecting that all the “facts” of your life, are stories, told by you or by someone else. I'm just saying that the linear narrativity that is your consciousness, is just a collection of quotes from your biography. Your mind is such a story of stories. But which are the sources? Other minds telling stories. When you say “it happened to me”, you are taking anecdotes of someone else and saying: this time it happened to me. You don't realize that in the same instant in which you say something, you are inventing the protagonist of the episode. You create the mind by quoting what happens to her. So when you state a feeling, you represent the subject in charge of feeling and say: that is me. The collection of episodes that belongs to the human experience, this time happens to me! Well, every time you say “I”, it's a quote from the old book of identity, which is nowhere. Every mind is the fictional creation of an accelerated brain and to be real, it must be traced back to the past. There is no narration without past, so our history is our forgery.